Richard Todd responded:
>There seems to be virtual unanimity on this list that Solomon was wrong
>in his Brentano deduction. He admits that there is room for reasonable
>doubt, but it seems to me that he presents a plausible case for the
>identification. As for a letter in the possession of a mysterious
>nobleman, but unavailable to anyone else . . . come on now!
And I'm afraid I have to agree with Richard on this one. Just because
the letter cannot be published does not mean that scholars who have read
it--Joyce Maier's insider acquaintance, for example--couldn't paraphrase,
summarize and analyze it.
And I have a question about the Solomon biography. I haven't read it, but
I gather that the theory underpinning Solomon's biography is psychological.
Now, that fact alone, that Solomon uses psychology, does not, for me
anyway, automatically make his book a bad biography. It seems to me that
there are good biographies which employ the insights of psychology, and bad
biographies which employ the insights of psychology. The mere fact that a
biography uses psychology, though, does not, in itself, disqualify the
work.
I do believe that biographers have to have some--one hesitates to use
the word, it's such a bogey these days--theory which enables them to
decide which facts are relevant, which are irrelevant, which should be
foregrounded, which only glanced at, and so on. Otherwise we get mere
chronology--first this happened, then that happened and then this happened
. . . .
So, in the estimate of Solomon's critics, is his biography bad *because*
it's psychological, or is it a bad psychological biography?
Yours,
David Cozy
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